“Why Windows 7 Costs so Much” and other links…
I, Cringely: “Setting the price at $119.95 is a brilliant move on Microsoft’s part. The company doesn’t want users to upgrade so by setting the price high Microsoft is essentially imposing a Windows 7 upgrade tax on users. Buy a new Windows 7 PC from Staples and the software price drops to $49.95, the same as Snow Leopard. …Microsoft likes to make money, hence the Windows 7 tax, but their main reason for setting the price so high is to get us all to buy new computers. That brings Microsoft less revenue per unit but more revenue overall as businesses, for example, decide to upgrade a whole office with new PC’s rather than pay $119.95 per desk just for new software. New PCs come with dramatically lower support costs for Microsoft than do retail upgrades. The pricing ploy makes Microsoft very popular, too with its Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) like HP, Dell, and hundreds of others.”
“squid : Optimising Web Delivery”
squid-cache.org: “Squid is used by hundreds of Internet Providers world-wide to provide their users with the best possible web access. Squid optimises the data flow between client and server to improve performance and caches frequently-used content to save bandwidth. Squid can also route content requests to servers in a wide variety of ways to build cache server hierarchies which optimise network throughput. …Thousands of web-sites around the Internet use Squid to drastically increase their content delivery. Squid can reduce your server load and improve delivery speeds to clients. Squid can also be used to deliver content from around the world—copying only the content being used, rather than inefficiently copying everything. Finally, Squid’s advanced content routing configuration allows you to build content clusters to route and load balance requests via a variety of web servers.”
“Official Name for ‘Geneva’”
Microsoft “Geneva” Team (7/2009): “This Monday, Microsoft made several announcements at the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans. Among these announcements were the official names for the Geneva products currently in Beta. …The three components of Microsoft ‘Geneva’ have the following names: … Active Directory Federation Services—formerly known as ‘Geneva’ Server. Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) enables Active Directory to be an identity provider in the claims based access platform. AD FS provides end users a single sign-on experience across applications, platforms and organizations and simplifies identity management for IT Pros by reducing duplicate accounts. …Windows Identity Foundation—formerly known as ‘Geneva’ Framework. Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) offers sets of APIs for ASP.NET and WCF developers to build claims-aware applications and make them federation capable. This API set covers both building relying party applications and federation services that can issue security tokens. …Windows CardSpace—same as current version. Windows CardSpace enables managed and native applications to participate in the claims-based access platform. Windows CardSpace empowers end-users to have better control of their identity and allows administrators to setup streamlined single sign-on access.” Two important bits here: first, this is Microsoft’s play for claims-based security. Second, is the Windows Identity Foundation—yet another API soon to come to the .NET framework.